DynamiX, the annual computer symposium of Ramjas Public School RK Puram was held on 26th November 2010. With over 26 schools participating, DYNAMIX 2010 was a success if one doesn’t take the refreshments into account. Code Warriors bagged the Runners Up trophy along with 4 individual wins. And since this is my blog I can add a bit about my win also; 3rd in Quiz.

It wasn’t till the eve of the event that I was sure if I’d be going or not. As it turned out, I went and it meant well for all. With Vivek Nair taking his cue from competitions and VS Karthick and our two main programmers, Akash and Harmanpreet busy with their preboards all the responsibility was on me and Aditya Kumar. We took three new kids for the competition. 2 programmers, Archit and Varun and one for GD, Manan. With a hope to win the overall in our hearts we boarded the bus to Ramjas Public School RK Puram. Just like EXUN the bus ride to Ramjas was also vey short. It took barely 10 minutes to reach the school and took 10 more to find a place to park the bus. I told everyone to shout KEVIN while getting down from the bus and the thing that I had been dreading happened. I ended up shouting KEVIN alone. No unity in the team whatsoever!

With the registration done and nothing to do since DynamiX was running behind schedule I went to check out the school. Don’t get me wrong but the school felt like a Nazi Torture camp. With long unlighted corridors with small chamber like room for classes and a flickering low power tubelight it was anything but soothing. It was like the cellular jail coupled with a torture chamber. And for the record, I even witnessed saw a teacher slap a boy.

As announcements were made for different competition on a microphone which got slapped more time than any kid in particular, participants started leaving for their respective events. I was in for quiz with Vaibhav Gulaiti since crossword and quiz were clashing. I also wanted to go for GD but even it was clashing. As it turned out, since the event was running a bit off schedule, they changed the timings a bit and all three events started and ended on totally different and non-clashing times. Sad.

On their website it was written “Participants are suggested not to take part in 2 Overlapping Events.” Since they used the word suggested and not “not allowed” people registered themselves for two clashing events. When the DYNAMIX heads were contacted they simply refused to let one particiapnt go for mulitiple events but eventually they did allow it.

As we started the quiz we realised that qualifying would be difficult for us. The paper was easy and we missed quite a few questions with some of them being sitters. First question

What was Google’s original domain when it was established?

Yahoo ka to akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo hai. Google ka stanford.edu/google ho sakta hai…..

The answer turned out to be Google.stanford.edu. I think we were given marks because the Stanford thing is actually more important than where Google is written

Another question

He was born in 1981. He is a research assistant and a PhD candidate at MIT Media Lab. He is also the inventor of Mouseless. Who am I talking about?

Pranav Mistry. Easy peasy.

Done with the paper we exited the room with low spirits only to find out something which raised our those spirits. The team consisting of Aditya and Vishal had qualified for crossword finals even after answering only 3 out of 16. Prempal Singh from NEPS got 11, Seriously?! And don’t go by the difference in the preliminary scores because Aditya and Vishal may have come last in the prelims but they came first in the finals and the win was by a margin of 20 points.

Quiz results were announced after 20 or so minutes. Apparently, we were wrong and we easily qualified. The cut off was 6 and we had 9 correct. With half an hour of supposed to be pure boredom I acquired the crossword prelims paper which was actually pretty good. The crossword finals were pretty good as well. To be truthful, it was a tad too easy (or at least Aditya and Vishal made it look so) .

The quiz finals started on a good note with some really good questions but as the quiz progressed the quality of questions kept going down. For a moment I heard myself saying aloud to the Quiz Master that the answer to some X question was “this-was-supposed-be-a-tech-quiz-I-guess”. I controlled my self after that and kept on answering questions (wrongly).  The quiz was supposed to be an infinite bounce quiz but the quiz master didn’t know what it was so he dropped the idea of infinite bounce. This question came up in the quiz. The question was directed at team B while I was D.

For which system the first computer virus “Elk Cloner” written?

Team B: Er..

Quiz Master (after 30 seconds): Passes on to team C.

Me (Interjecting): By system you mean the machine or the operating system?

Quiz Master: Machine.

Team C: Er..Apple I?

Quiz Master: No. Passes on to team D.

Me: Uhm..Apple II?

Quiz Master: Yes. It was the Apple II.

It was pure guess work. Thanks to team C for answering Apple I. Their answer just made me more confident of my answer which I hadn’t thought till then. Free points! FTW!

One thing that I think I should mention here is that the quiz finals didn’t took place on a stage. Rather, they took place in a small room with a projector in it. With no audience whatsoever and no stage fear I liked the way the quiz was conducted. The quiz ended with Prempal Singh and Jhashank Gupta of NEPS (New Era Public School, Mayapuri) tied with my team. Both at 30 points. After discussing it quite a few times the guys at DynamiX (dynamites if you would like to call them. Stupid name BTW) settled on giving both of the team the third position since there wasn’t any trophy for 2nd runners ups.

The crossword finals, as I already mentioned were a tad to easy. Yes, it was cryptic but not so much. One clue that I personally really liked was

Er…Can you please turn on the AC?

See the archives to know the answer :P

With two podium finishes in two events and three events to go the chances of getting an overall looked pretty good. News started coming in with the first one being that Manan had come 2nd in Group Discussion and second being that of Mrinal’s win in Gaming. The overall was ours. Nothing could stop it. But as fate had it, DPS RKPee came first in PowerPoint Presentation along with 4 other podium finishes. We hadn’t submitted the PPT because the invite reached us on the last day of submission and we couldn’t be bothered enough make a PPT in whatever little time that was left with us. Had it not been for the PPT we would have surely replaced DPS RKPee as the overall winners.

Archives

Download the Quiz Prelims.

Download the Quiz Finals.

Download the Crossword Prelims. (Previewing the file will not work. First download and then open file in any Browser.)

Download the Crossword Finals. (Previewing the file will not work. First download and then open file in any Browser.)

Filed under: Code Warriors, DPS Vasant Kunj, quizzing, Symposiums, Travel Tagged: Doctor of Philosophy, games, google, History of Google, India, iPod Touch, Massive Multiplayer Online, Mayapuri, Mouseless, Pranav Mistry, PRWEB, quiz, Recreation, Recreation and Sports, Search Engines, Searching, Stanford University, Trivia, United States, Varun, Video Games, Vivek (actor), Wealth management, wordpress, Yahoo